Taiwan Vacation: The East Coast

After spending a couple of days in Taipei, we decided to travel down the East coast of Taiwan. From Taipei we took a 3 and a half hour train South to a city called Hualien.

Hualien: We spent 2 nights in this small city, which was surrounded by mountains. We walked around the city during the day and did some shopping. We saw some strange shops here, one being a Playboy store selling clothes with the playboy bunny on it. The playboy bunny logo is popular in Japan, too, even with kids! We're not sure if they know what it means or not.

Passing by the tourist information center in Hualien, we decided to ask about a restaurant recommendation. We took a taxi that night to the recommended restaurant. We immediately realized that this was a very authentic restaurant with no other foreigners in sight. We walked in and found there was only 1 thing to order, dumpling soup. We placed our order and went to sit down at a table. The place was packed with Taiwanese families all sitting at huge round tables. Only being the 2 of us, we were reluctant to take-up a huge round table, but there was no other option. We sat down and began eating our soup, which was DELICIOUS, when a family of 9 came over to our table and hesitantly started to sit down. Apparently, the restaurant was completely full and they needed a place to sit. We were really excited at the chance to meet a Taiwanese family and immediately told them it was okay. Sitting with us was a mom, dad, son-10, daughter-8, daughter-2, aunt, 2 uncles, and grandma. As they got settled, the 10 year old boy started asking us questions in English and translating the conversations between us and his family. His English was amazing! He takes private English lessons and also studies English at school.

At the end of dinner, the family invited us to a Taiwanese aboriginal dance performance with them. They took us in their minivan to the aboriginal village and we ended up spending the rest of the evening with them!

Here is a video of the aboriginal dancing:

Towards the end of the show, the host came into the audience asking for 2 volunteers to come on stage. Of course, we had no idea what was going on because no one was speaking English. The next thing we knew, the entire family was pointing at us, as well as half the audience, wanting us to go on stage! Having no choice, we went on stage. A college student from San Fransisco was visiting Taiwan and offered to come on stage to translate for us. Here are some pictures of our "performance!"

Here is another friend we made....our translator from San Fransisco.

Taroko Gorge: While in Hualien, we took a day trip to the Taroko National Park, which was amazing! The National Park is a 20km stretch that has marble-walled canyons, tree-covered cliffs, waterfalls, tunnels, a river, and a shrine. We took a bus tour throughout the gorge that stopped periodically so we could walk around and explore. The pictures really don't do it justice!

Here are some pictures of the shrine that overlooks the gorge. We got to go into the pagoda and climb the spiraling staircase to the top.

Jiufen: After Hualien, we took a train 2 hours north along the eastern coast to Jiufen. This was the quaintest city we visited and it turned out to be one of our favorites. We stayed in a really cute bed & breakfast type inn that overlooked the sea. This city is known for their decorative-style tea houses and traditional narrow streets. The city mainly consists of one main street that has small shops and restaurants. We spent a day and a half wandering in and out of shops and drinking tea at the traditional tea houses. The views were so beautiful here and the atmosphere was so peaceful, we really could have stayed here a few more days if we had time.

This is our B&B and the view from the front patio:

Green Bay Beach: From Jiufen we then took an hour bus ride north to a privately run beach resort. We stayed one night at the Howard Plaza Hotel. This hotel was huge! It had 4 restaurants, a convenience store, an entertainment room with pool tables and ping pong, a gym, indoor and outdoor pools, and a private beach. The beach was really pretty with mountains lining the inside of the bay. Here is the view from our hotel room.

We spent a day on the beach and swimming in the pool. We were really surprised when the lifeguards made us get out of the pool to buy a swim cap. Apparently, everyone has to wear a swim cap to go into the pool. We felt really dorky!

Yehliu: Just outside of Green Bay is Yehliu, a long cape where sea and wind erosion has caused some unique rock formations. We had a lot of fun exploring the cape.

Back to Taipei: The last 2 days were spent in Taipei again, but unfortunately a typhoon hit so we weren't able to do anything except walk around malls and see a couple of movies. Overall, we loved Taiwan...the people were extremely nice, the food was great, and the sights were beautiful!

Taiwan Vacation: Taipei

On August 11, we flew to Taiwan for a 9 day vacation! With Taiwan's close ties to China and one of their primary languages being Mandarin, we thought this vacation would give us an insight on the Chinese culture. Plus it's only a 3 hour flight from Japan. This was the first time traveling that we didn't book anything in advance. Luckily, we had no problems finding hotels and transportation along the way. We began and ended our trip in the Northern capital city Taipei and spent the majority of the vacation traveling along the east coast.

Taipei:

Shilin Night Market: The first night we spent at the Shilin night market. This market was a typical Asian market with a ton of cheap clothes and weird foods. One thing that surprised us were the amount of dogs for sale. There were dozens of pet shops selling puppies that looked only a week or 2 old. We had never seen such small puppies for sale before. We found it sad and disturbing. We also saw a stand where you could pay to do ear candling. This is when a hollow candle is placed in your ear and then lit on fire to have the wax burned out (picture below). We've actually done this at home before!

Within the Shilin Night Market was a great food market. There were rows and rows of vendors cooking and selling all different kinds of food. It took us a while to get the nerve to eat at one, but once we did, we were pleasantly surprised! We ate dumplings and an omelet.

Taipei 101- This was our favorite sight in Taipei. Taipei 101 is currently the tallest building in the world (101 floors, 508m tall). The building was built to resemble a stalk of bamboo. We took the fastest elevator in the world to the observation deck in only 37 seconds! The views from the top were amazing; great views of the city and the mountains. They offered a free audio set in English that told us what we were looking at on each side of the building, which was really interesting.

Taipei 101 Mall- Inside Taipei 101 was a huge 6 story mall that was full of designer shops and nice restaurants. We spent a few hours shopping here one day.

Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall- This is a Chinese-style memorial dedicated to Taiwan's first dictator. The National Theatre and Concert Hall are also on the grounds.

Martyr's Shrine War Memorial- This enshrines the dead of the wars fought on behalf of the Republic of China. The main attraction at this shrine is to see the guards that stand absolutely still for 1 hour until they are replaced with a new guard. It was amazing how they didn't even move their eyes!

National Palace Museum- This museum is the most famous and popular attraction in Taipei. It has the world's finest collection of Chinese art as old as 8,000 years! We were surprised to learn that Western art only began to appear about 80% of the way through Chinese art history. We walked around the museum for about an hour until everything started looking the same. Unfortunately we couldn't take pictures inside.

Chinese Temple- We also visited a small Chinese temple in Taipei. The temples in Taiwan are very different than Japanese temples. They are very colorful, gaudy, and have a lot of dragons.

Our impression of Taipei: We really enjoyed visiting Taipei. Even though large cities usually have the same feel to us, we were able to see a lot of cultural sights that made it unique. We were really surprised how many people spoke English. Just about everyone we spoke to was able to carry on a conversation or answer our questions. We also thought the subways were clean and really easy to use since they were in English. Another surprise for us was how developed the city was. We were expecting to see much lower living conditions than we came across. No one ever bothered us and we never felt in danger. Since we've been away from home for a year now, we loved how many American restaurants the city had and we ate at every Western restaurant we came across: Subway, Pizza Hut, Dunkin Donuts, and McDonald's!

The #1 shock for us was how many Starbucks Taipei had...it literally seemed like one on every other corner! We were in heaven! Overall, Taipei is a great city, but after a couple of days we were ready to see what the rest of Taiwan had to offer. See our next blog about our time spent on the east coast!